Institute of Fundamental Sciences, Massey University,
Palmerston North, New Zealand.
a.j.godfrey@massey.ac.nz
and
School of Engineering and Advanced Technology, Massey University,
Palmerston North, New Zealand.
james@curtis.net.nz
Blind users want the same from base R as does any other user.
More importantly though, we also want the same benefits that front-ends and integrated development environments offer our classmates and colleagues.
These problems are further compounded when content from outside the application must be included in the document being prepared, such as when copying and pasting statistical analyses.
Markdown has become more commonplace as a tool for authoring online content, such as found on wiki' pages.
It is valued for its simplicity and efficiency, but is therefore also quite limited in terms of the range of formatting flexibility.
Under normal circumstances, a markdown source file is converted to HTML, meaning the resulting material is very accessible for screen reader users. There are several variants of markdown in common use today but their similarity is very high, as is the similarity of the resulting HTML.
Markdown is a simple markup language. The primary output document type is HTML, but use of pandoc (See the pandoc home page at http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/) means that one source markdown file can be processed into many different output document formats including HTML, Microsoft Word, pdf (via LaTeX), Open Office, rich text format, and a variety of slide show presentation formats.
Mathematical content is entered using a simplified set of LaTeX expressions.
This functionality comes from the knitr package, the rmarkdown package, and their dependencies.
R has proven to offer more to a blind user than any other statistical software in common use today; combining the power of R with the ease of document preparation offered by markdown gives new workflow options to all R users.
Blind people can benefit because we get the accessibility features we need with no extra effort as authors.
We now demonstrate use of R by introducing a new Windows application written in Python.
As long as the user has not made mistakes, the HTML file can be opened in a browser for viewing.
The basic workflow for the blind user is to edit the rmd, build the HTML, and then refresh the browser. Doing this often is advisable.
In summary, WriteR gives the blind author an accessible editor for source content so they can independently produce their own accessible final documents that contain statistical analyses.
2007 Started using R almost exclusively for personal work.
2008 R included in teaching and all research work.
2009 Promoted R as viable alternative for blind students at WEIMS09 conference in Fukuoka.
2010 Started using Sweave.
2011 Promoted R to blind students at the Summer University held in the Czech Republic.
2012 Announced potential for the BrailleR package at DEIMS12 conference in Tokyo.
2013 R Journal article gets printed (includes announcement of BrailleR package).
Promoted R to blind students at the Summer University held in Germany.
2014 Addendum to R Journal article.
attend UseR in Los Angeles.
Promoted R to blind students at the Summer University held in France.
2015 Attended UseR in Denmark and held workshops in Europe.
I promoted R in
2011 
2013 
& 2014 
Following the cancellation of the 2015 event planned for the U.S. I contributed to a small substitute conference in The Netherlands.
Workshops in Germany and the UK followed.
As with all even-numbered years, the 2016 event will be held in conjunction with the International Conference on Computers Helping People.
In 2017 we will be in the U.S.
As well as promoting base R at Summer University, I added a workshop on using the functionality within R that embeds statistical commands into a LaTeX document at the 2014 event.
I saw how easy R markdown could be for blind users in the week prior to Summer University 2014 while attending the UseR confernece in Los Angeles.
If I had started work with R markdown before then, that 2014 SU workshop would never have been offered as the markdown way of working is just so much easier to grapple with.
I started using R markdown for so many things in my own work then and have seldom wanted to make use of the LaTeX way of working since.
My own frustration at the way I needed to process the Rmd files led to my interactions with James Curtis who helped me convert some Python code I had developed as a project (some years earlier) for an accessible LaTeX editor.
We haven't finished all of that conversion as much of that code is present, but hidden in the WriteR.pyw source file.
I did deliver an R markdown workshop at the event in The Netherlands and incorporated this topic into my workshops in Germany (KIT) and the U.K. (Bath) during July 2015.
WriteR did not get exposed at that time as it was still not quite ready for public consumption.
I used the WriteR editor throughout the first semester of 2015 for my own teaching as a testing ground for its developments.
I've written all the slides for this talk using WriteR.
We have ensured that the WriteR interface:
Announced in 2012 to a specific audience (DEIMS) and 2013 to the R community (The R Journal).
WriteR.pyw is now included in the BrailleR distribution, with the most recent version available via GitHub (ajrgodfrey/BrailleR).
A function WriteR() that opens a specified file in WriteR is also included in the BrailleR package.
Other support functions to improve how blind users can improve their Rmd usage have been included:
BrailleR users get plenty of example R markdown because some functions in BrailleR create accessible documents for common statistical tasks; this aims to replace inaccessible Graphical User Interfaces built to help novice R users.
Converting the Python source code to C++ will improve the interactivity of WriteR to BrailleR users as they will receive an executable application and remove the dependency on download of Python 2.7 and wxPython 2.8
once we have a working set of C++ scripts, we will make them availabel via the GitHub repository (ajrgodfrey/WriteR).
Now it's time to get more blind R users working with WriteR.
I want a find/replace feature.
I really do want new users to help us by pushing us to improve WriteR.
-By going to GitHub there is a chance that others will contribute to the development of WriteR.
Participants include lecturers (4), students (~10), disability support staff (3), and other blind people using R (~10).
The National Federation of the Blind in the USA is graciously hosting our email list.
It is not practical to meet up as a group in a physical sense, and thus far we have not worked out how to gather in a virtual setting.
BlindRUG has been (mostly) an announcement list until very recently.
Let's do a few things:
